


Hardy

by Miss_M



Category: Sunshine (2007)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Botany, Character Study, Food, Gen, Hope, Science, Vegetables, Worldbuilding, Yuletide Treat
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-25
Updated: 2020-12-25
Packaged: 2021-03-10 18:26:53
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,416
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28141608
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Miss_M/pseuds/Miss_M
Summary: “Have you seen the news? TheIcarus IImission, they say it’s a success.”
Comments: 6
Kudos: 9
Collections: Yuletide 2020





	Hardy

**Author's Note:**

  * For [HopefulNebula](https://archiveofourown.org/users/HopefulNebula/gifts).



> I own nothing.

“Good morning, Virginie,” Corazon said, pulling off her gloves and wrestling with her balaclava. Her nose started to run as soon as she stepped from the subzero outside to the heat– and humidity-regulated air inside the lab.

“Have you seen the news?” Her lab assistant was practically hopping with excitement. “The _Icarus II_ mission, they say it’s a success.”

Corazon’s arms sagged for a moment, but she rallied and pulled her head free of the balaclava. She hadn’t expected the news to hit her so hard. Then again, the whole world had been on edge since the inception of the _Icarus_ project seven years earlier. Going about one’s everyday affairs could be hard in the face of imminent extinction, and the slim hope held out by _Icarus_ tended to fray rather than soothe the nerves, especially after the first _Icarus_ ship went radio silent and vanished. Humanity had already squandered two chances to keep the planet and itself safe.

“Oh,” Corazon said. “Well, that’s good news.”

“They’re saying we might start to notice an increase in the solar energy reaching us within six months. Maybe sooner!”

“A surface temperature increase of 0.01 to 0.03 degrees Celsius, isn’t it? Unlikely we’ll be sunbathing any time soon.” 

Corazon tried for good-natured ribbing, but it did not come easily: Virginie didn’t know about Corazon’s history with the _Icarus_ project, and she tended to get voluble about her enthusiasms, like the latest speed-skating star’s brushes with the law or the foibles of the _Icarus_ crewmembers. Personally, Corazon could have lived without knowing what flavor of ice cream each one of them favored.

She took pity on Virginie’s crestfallen expression and smiled. “It’s very exciting. Thank you for telling me. You can tell me more when we take our break. Now, do you have the results from the sixth sector? Do we know what’s causing the leaf discoloration there?”

After checking the chemical analysis results with Virginie, Corazon exchanged her outside layers for a biohazard suit and ventured into the greenhouse attached to her lab. Rows and rows of beds of lovely-smelling earth spread before her, divided into sectors. Most of the beds were topped by low bunches of wide, flat leaves curling at the edges. 

Even in a world whose diet had become dependent on tubers and synthetics, turnips did not make for the sexiest project titles on grant applications. Corazon’s late mother had always refused to cook or eat turnips after she’d survived on them during the first stage of the earth’s rapid cooling, when she’d been a child and societal violence had ticked up in both prevalence and savagery as the availability of land on which to cultivate _Poaceae_ had diminished. “I will live on beets and radishes if I must,” she used to say with a dramatic shudder. “Not _those_.”

Corazon still kept a few rows of spinach in one sector of the greenhouse, over in the southwest corner. A memento or a display of her inherent stubbornness? She’d been working on spinach when she was offered the position of biologist on the _Icarus I_ , and had turned it down with a leaden heart because she’d been on the verge of a breakthrough that could have made spinach able to withstand temperatures of down to –8 degrees Celsius. 

She’d told herself at the time that fear had not contributed to her reluctance; seven years later, Corazon still didn’t like to think about this too hard or for too long.

They hadn’t called her back for the _Icarus II_ – if anyone was tactless and well-informed enough to ask, Corazon said it was because she’d become too old, that was all – her spinach revolution had come to naught in the meantime, and she had switched to turnips. She could have gone into edible grasses, worth their proverbial weight in gold now that only the very rich could afford rice or bread, but she preferred her research to be useful to all people, so she’d gone into turnips instead. But she still liked to keep a hand in with spinach. 

The neat rows of turnip leaves nodded and rustled under the fans. Corazon bent and inspected the leaves in the sixth sector, moving slowly along the edge of the vegetable bed.

Ten minutes later, her back ached like hell and gave an ominous twinge when she straightened up. She’d need to apply a heating pad in the evening. Knowing it would do no good and might ensure the incipient stiffness around her lower spine would make it impossible for her to sit in her desk chair tomorrow, she indulged the impulse to press her hands against her lower back as best she could in the cumbersome biohazard suit and stretch. Tipping her head as far back as she could without falling over – the suit and the headgear both annoying and likely saving her from her own foolishness – Corazon exhaled at the momentary relief in her back and looked up at the top of the greenhouse and the sky beyond it.

The sun was just visible through a scrim of cloud, pale as a poached egg, back when most people could still afford eggs that came in any shape but powder. 

Despite how annoyed she could get about it while her mother was alive, Corazon understood her mother’s stubborn resistance to turnips: she’d eaten real eggs while undergoing the tests and interviews for _Icarus_ , nothing but the best for potential saviors of humankind. Since then, she ate powdered eggs solely for the protein and covered up their taste with (synthetic, now) soy sauce or hot sauce.

The irrational part of her wanted to pull off her biohazard suit, contamination of samples be damned, and stand and bask in the amplified heat of the sun. But she knew that the greenhouse’s warm air was a sensory illusion of sorts, and if she were to go outside, her skin wouldn’t detect a noticeable change in temperature. The _Icarus II_ ’s success would be measured by very expensive instruments. People would notice the knock-on effects – growing season getting longer by a day or a week over a period of years, the prices of certain foods dropping, the rich finding new status symbols when ( _if_ ) corn and rice and millet became the poor person’s staple again – long before they would notice the sun making their exposed skin tingle in summer, prompting them to maybe shed a layer.

She knew all this, and still a part of Corazon – the part that had used to write terrible poetry as a young girl and could still wax poetic after a few glasses of vodka about the hardiness and the nutritional benefits and the rich green color of spinach – wanted to be infected by Virginie’s enthusiasm. She wanted to be able to convince herself that she could feel the sun burning her face through the glass roof and the visor on her suit. She scolded herself for her fancy and startled herself in equal measure, thinking she could see the _Icarus II_ returning to Earth, a dark speck among the slate-grey clouds, against the slightly paler smear of the sun, though she knew it would be a year and a half before their return. Must have been a speck of bird shit on the greenhouse roof, or a bit of loose dirt caught under a tiny patch of ice. 

The comm unit in Corazon’s suit crackled. “Doctor Cho, is everything alright? Is there a crack in the glass again? Should I call maintenance?”

Corazon dragged herself back to a fully vertical position, nothing but rows of turnips and the far wall of the greenhouse in her line of sight, and pressed a button on her left cuff. “Everything’s fine,” she said. “I just drifted off into space for a moment. I’ll finish checking this sector and return.”

“Roger that,” Virginie, who watched a lot of movies, replied and cut the comm link. 

Corazon didn’t glance up at the sun again. She’d have plenty of time for that while walking from her lab to the maglev station after work, and again tomorrow morning, and every day after that. Sighing, she obeyed what her graduate mentor had used to call _the cardinal rule of needs must_ and bent low again. Trying to ignore the warning ache in her lower back, she reached for another turnip leaf, still dewy from the sprinklers, its broad, flat surface turned up like an empty plate toward the pale light emanating from the sky.


End file.
